Not Like Other Girls
by boldlikeblack
Summary: Rated for language and gratuitous violence.


**A/N: So this is pretty clearly A/U. In this, the Basterds fail to kill Hitler, but succeed in not getting caught. So everybody's favourite bat-wielding Bear Jew makes it home to Boston. None of this belongs to me. I'm just playing in the sandboxes of Tarantino and Whedon. Thanks.**

***

Though she was pretty smart cookie, it took Heather Donowitz a surprisingly long time to realize she wasn't like other girls.

***

The first time she had a feeling about her 'differentness,' Heather was five years old. Her parents had just died in a car accident that had left her and her brother Mickey relatively intact. She'd gotten out with a few cuts and scrapes, including a nasty cut across her right brow, and Mickey had broken his left arm in three places, but at least they were alive which was more than she could say for her folks.

Everyone else at her parents' funeral was misty-eyed and solemn, but Heather's eyes were dry. Mickey was crying so hard that his face was covered in snot and their bubbie had to wipe it off because Mickey was in such a state he couldn't do it himself. Heather understood that her parents were never coming back, but it never occurred to her to be sad about it. It was like a few months before when her hamster had kicked the bucket and her mother had told her that sometimes people go somewhere they can't come back from. You had to try to be a good person, her mother had said, and if you were good enough you'd get to see them again when you moved on.

Heather held her bubbie's hand tight as the rabbi droned on and on, but not once did she shed a tear for her dearly departed parents.

***

A few years later, Heather had another one of her feelings. She came around the corner from school one day to find Neil Feldstein, an older boy from down the street, taunting Mickey because their father, a well known Jew around the neighbourhood, had chosen to marry an Irish-Catholic woman from Southie instead of a nice Jewish girl. It didn't seem to matter to Neil that their mother had given up both her faith and family by choosing to covert to Judaism to marry their father. All that mattered was that she and Mickey had inherited their mother's dark red hair, pale skin, and Irish features, which made them wrong and different in the eyes of Jews-for-generations like Neil.

Heather stood watching as Mickey held his own in the insult department, but the minute Neil and his goony friends laid their fists into Mickey, it was all over. She saw red and she was on Neil Feldstein in one hot second.

It took three grown-ups, all large men who were the fathers of Neil's goons, to pry her off him. Heather couldn't really recall what happened when her bubbie was yelling at her, but she knew her torn knuckles would leave scars for the rest of her life.

Heather was strangely comfortable with it.

***

When she was twelve, Heather came home from school one day to find her bubbie having tea with a man in a tweed suit. He blathered on and on in an English accent about how he and his associates saw so much potential in Heather and how they would like for her to come to their school.

Heather dropped her book bag inside the door and totally ignored the guy when he tried to talk to her. She just grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl, kissed her bubbie's cheek and told her she was going to find Mickey and see if they could arrange some kind of pick-up baseball game. Her bubbie just told her to make sure they were back in time to wash up for dinner.

As Heather knocked the ball out of the park, she saw two more tweed guys watching her from the bleachers. She gave them the old one finger salute and adjusted her Sox hat. Heather didn't really think there was anything special about herself, unless you counted the fact that she was the only Irish-Jew in her class. She wasn't extra smart or extra talented, though she was wicked good at baseball. When she looked back again, the men were gone.

Later, after dinner, when her bubbie told Heather that she had turned down tweed-guy's offer, Heather again had a feeling she was different. Most girls would have been really happy to hear that they had the potential to be chosen for something special, but Heather wasn't. She was happier just to stay with Mickey and their bubbie in Bubbie's run down old apartment that had been in her family since before WWII.

As she fell asleep that night, Heather didn't feel a lick of regret over the missed opportunity.

***

By the time senior prom rolled around, Heather had a pretty good inkling she wasn't like other girls.

No guys had asked her to the dance, which was fine because they were either filthy little mouth breathers looking to get into her pants or they were guys she'd known for so long it would be weird to go with them. She was never really one for dresses and fancy shoes anyways.

Mickey had sounded sad when she told him that nobody asked her to prom. Heather felt bad about disappointing her big brother, again. He was always really sad about how Heather never managed to have a normal high school career. She knew it probably would have been easier on him if she'd joined cheerleading, instead of the baseball team, or if she'd worn skirts and liked pop music instead of wearing torn jeans and spending her spare cash on tickets to the Dropkick Murphys' shows. Heather loved her brother, but she wasn't going to pretend to be someone else, no matter how much she loved him. Of course, if Bubbie asked her to behave and act like a nice Jewish girl, she'd do it in a heartbeat, but that was Bubbie.

So it was that Heather spent prom night at home, eating latkes with her bubbie and watching a Sox game on their ancient TV.

It was just how Heather liked things.

***

Heather had a kind of epiphany one night after she graduated high school. It was a wicked cold night for autumn. Winter was sneaking around the corner. Heather shivered all the way home in her thin fall coat.

The commute from UMass Boston was turning out to be a real bitch, but at least Bubbie didn't make her pay rent. All the money she'd saved from working in a sandwich shop all summer, along with a nice scholarship, was being used to pay for books and tuition. Even then she could barely afford it, but it made Bubbie so damn proud to say that both her grandchildren were getting higher education.

She knew something was wrong from the way the apartment door was hanging off its hinges and the shouts coming from the inside. When she rushed inside, Heather was greeted with a very strange sight. Her bubbie was in the kitchen, waving a cast iron frying pan threateningly at what looked like some kind of gremlin-monk that had no eyes.

Just as Heather walked in, the gremlin thing lunged at her bubbie with a weird curved knife. Seeing as that sure as shit was not going to do, Heather grabbed the closest weapon she could and jumped into the fray. The gremlin was tough, but Heather was tougher. She put all of her strength behind her strikes and brained the thing but good.

In the end, the gremlin was left lying in a rapidly expanding pool of blood with a caved in skull. Heather just stood there for a moment, staring at the aluminum bat in her blood soaked hand. Before she'd grabbed it, the bat had just been a normal piece of sporting equipment lying against the wall where she'd left it after her last pick-up game. Now, though, it was like she'd never seen anything like it before. In a weird way, it was sort of beautiful.

When she turned around to check on her bubbie, she saw that Bubbie had a look in her eyes that was a mixture of pride, horror, and amazement. It was then that Heather realized she would never really be like other girls.

She realized that there was something fearsome and dark inside of her, something strong and primal. It wasn't something that was necessarily unfeminine, but she doubted that Agnes Shumeyer or Jenny Goldman would ever be able to tap something murderous inside of them and brain a man...creature...to death with an aluminum baseball bat.

Most girls would have cried for days after killing someone. Heather just placed the bat against the wall, helped her bubbie into a living room chair, and asked if there was a tarp and ammonia she could use to clean up the linoleum.

***

After 'the Incident, which most certainly did not consist of Heather bludgeoning a creature to death, dismembering it, and burning it hobo-style in a barrel across town, Heather started to feel more comfortable with herself. It was as if, with that one act of necessary, righteous, gratuitous violence, Heather had discovered a part of her that was missing all along.

She started having weird dreams around the same time as 'the Incident.' She dreamed of a woman in California, a blond, fighting for her life against creatures with disfigured faces. There were other girls there too, girls like her, girls who had the potential to be chosen for something great. Never once did Heather feel the urge to race across the country and join them.

Then one day, something happened.

The summer heat beat down on Boston and everyone felt it. Heather had been cranky all day, which could be equally contributed to the searing heat and to having to watch her older brother, who was home from college for the summer, shove his tongue down Jenny Goldman's throat. She was in the middle of fixing a sandwich for Ryan O'Conner, a boy she had gone to school with, when she felt something take hold of her.

The world around her shifted and she could see, clearly, all the faces of the girls she had been dreaming of. They were fighting and dying and she was just standing there in a stupid Boston deli doing nothing to help them. Then she heard a woman's voice.

"Are you ready to be strong?" it asked her.

Her entire body sang out in response. Yes, it cried, I've always been ready. The Heather felt like she was hit by a shock wave that knocked her right off her feet. When she came to, she was staring into Ryan's concerned eyes. She waved him away and brushed her pants off, suddenly full of energy. However, her boss, Mr. Wicki, sent her packing home for the day.

***

When she got home, Heather found her bubbie sitting in one of the living room chairs with a package in her lap. Whatever it was, the thing was pretty long, and it was wrapped in black velvet. Mickey wouldn't be home for hours, so Heather was fairly certain that her bubbie was waiting on her.

Heather took a seat on the couch and for a long moment, Bubbie just stared at her. When Bubbie spoke, she lovingly ran her fingers along the cloth.

"This belonged to my father," she said.

Heather sent her bubbie a half smile. "Aww, Bubbie, I didn't do anything to deserve a present," she said, "and you're too young to start giving away your possessions. You've got loads of good years in your yet."

"I felt it today," Bubbie said, "that thing that happened. I'm too old for it to take me, but you, you're still young."

"Bubbie, I don't know what you're talking about."

The stare her bubbie levelled at her was cold as ice, the older woman's blue eyes flashing. "You remember, when you were younger, there was a man who came to try to recruit you for a special school?"

Heather nodded.

"I sent him packing because the same thing happened to me when I was about that age. Some stuffed shirt British librarian shows up here telling my papa that I was special. He said I was a potential. He said that one day, with the right training, I might be lucky enough to be the one girl in all the world who could stand against the forces of the darkness."

Heather wonders if this is what dementia sounds like, but she says nothing. She wouldn't know what to say.

"Papa stood right up then, looming over that man like an angry golem, and told him that the Donowitzes had done their duty against the forces of darkness. He'd given up an ear and part of his arm, so the Donowitzes were out of the fighting business. I never saw him so mad in my whole life as I did when that man tried to take me away."

"Of course, that tweed clad little man had no idea who he was messing with, so he tried his damndest to use words to convince my papa to let me go be trained by these people from some council. Papa gave the man a three count to shut up and leave, but the guy just kept talking. So my papa, one armed as he was, goes to the closet and pulls this out," Bubbie said, gesturing to the object in her lap, "and told the man to get the fuck out or he was going to lay a real bad hurt down."

"Course the man didn't listen, he just stood up and started shouting at Papa that I had a duty to the people of the world to be prepared in case I was called. Papa took this in his one good arm and brought it down on the Englishman's knee with such a crack. I'm sure all the bones were broken. The Englishman got the hint after that. He limped out of this apartment fast as you please. Before he went out the door, Papa told him not to darken our door ever again, unless he wanted to bring down the fury of the Bär Juden – the Bear Jew - down on his whole organization."

"When that man came for you, I just told him we weren't interested in providing any service thank you. I also reminded him of my father's promise. He was out the door like the drop of a hat."

Heather just sat in silence, trying to process what Bubbie had just said. There was no freaking way that her great-grandfather, a frail old man she'd met once in a nursing home before he'd died when she was six, was the Bear Jew. That guy was a WWII legend. If you grew up Jewish in Boston, you knew the story off by heart. Huge guy goes off to war, huge guy gets drafted into a special unit bent on striking fear into Nazi hearts, huge guy does so with the aid of a Louisville slugger signed by all the neighbourhood folks, huge guy earns the name the Bear Jew, huge guy and his unit try – and fail – to kill Hitler, huge guys comes home a hero anyways, having been rumoured to have collected over one hundred Nazi scalps. There was no freaking way that Heather Donowitz was descended from someone so...epic.

Bubbie pulled the velvet cover off the thing she had in her lap and lo and behold it was a wooden bat. Age and use had faded the brand, but it sure as shit looked like a Slugger to Heather. Scrawled all over the surface were barely legible signatures, some obscured by suspicious brown stains. "No fucking way," Heather said at last.

"Language, Heather, please," Bubbie said.

"There's no way he was the freaking Bear Jew. No way, no day."

Bubbie nodded. "After he'd chased the man away, Papa told me the whole story. He made me promise to keep it to myself. He didn't really want to become a celebrity again, since most of the neighbourhood kids were too young to remember the day he came home from war. He put this bat in my hands and he said 'Hannah, that man was trying to say that being a warrior is in your blood.' Then he told me this was mine now, and that I wasn't supposed to tell anyone anything about it. It was a Donowitz family secret."

"This is part of the reason I never married your grandfather, rat of a man he was. I was even thankful that he ran off before your father was born. Sure, being a single mother in that age was hard, but so long as my boy was a Donowitz, it was worth it."

"I don't understand, Bubbie."

"Whatever it was that happened today, it means that you were chosen. You're going to be the one standing against the darkness. I want you to have this," Bubbie said, placing the bat in Heather's hands.

"I can't," Heather said.

"Yes you can. You always could. It's in your blood; I knew it the moment you looked at me after beating that nasty little monk's head in. You're going to be a great warrior, just like my father. It's only fitting that you use this to do it."

Heather stood then, closing her hand around the grip of the bat. Even though it was bad for a much larger man, it seemed to fit just right.

It was in that moment that Heather Donowitz that she would never, ever, be like other girls.

***

When Bubbie died, six months later, Heather pulled the bat out from under her bed and wrote 'Hannah Donowitz' with a sharpie on one side.

***

When Faith Lehane turned up on Heather's doorstep the following summer, and explained to Heather what exactly Bubbie had meant by the forces of darkness, Heather didn't hesitate to carve the handle end of the Slugger into a nice, big stake.

And when she stood over the first pile of vamp ashes she had ever made, Heather shot Faith the hugest smile she'd ever given anyone. Killing demons and vamps was as natural as breathing.

And so it should be, she thought with the Bear Jew's bat in her hand. After all, fighting the forces of darkness with nothing but a piece of wood was in her blood.


End file.
